TO THE ACCOMPANIMENT OF the sounds of a tropical forest in a bird-infested jungle and flashing projection of lighting, John Cage, when he was at Harvard last semester, presented a multi-media symphonic reading of Thoreau's Walden, with a dozen readers speaking simultaneously in irregular polyphony. With its torrential waves of sentences upon sentences, and splashing words and spilling syllables, the Cage extravaganza explored the possibilities of the human voice when reduced to a cascading unintelligibility. Cage showed the cathartic effect of flooding all the senses, and I remember myself screaming in unison at the top of my lungs toward the climax of the piece.

A similar multi-media reading of Dame Edith Sitwell's 1923 sound poem, Facade, is now at the Loeb. While I did not feel impelled to scream along with the show at the end--this being more like, say, a Mozart concerto than a Beethoven symphony--the Loeb production is admirably creative, refreshing and unhackneyed, and certainly deserved the spontaneous exclamation of approval of a member of the audience it did receive at the end of the first act the other night.

Just as the Cubist painters redirected attention away from the representational content of a painting and concentrated it upon the surface of the canvas as a flat plane, so Facade, by reducing words to a musical unintelligibility, explores the surface texture--the facade--of sound. With passages read at break neck speed like.

That hobnailed goblin, the bob-tailed

Hob,

Said, 'It is time I began to rob'

For strawberries bob, hob-nob with the

pearls...

or

Something lies beyond the scene, the encre

de chine, marine, obscene

Horizon

In

Hell

Black as a bison